"There" Music: Impossible Hope

I've long had a knack for listening to a very specific sort of music. I've had difficulty fully describing it, as it's not a genre or a movement necessarily but more so a philosophical current as far as musical creation is concerned. I think it's best that I outline the main artists I think of when I think of what I like to call "there" music: David Bowie (specifically the song Heroes), Bruce Springsteen's golden era, Cameron Winter and his work across both Geese and his solo output, and all of LCD Soundsystem. What do all of these artists have in common despite all being all time favourites of mine and primarily rock acts? Their music all has this current of maddening hope in spite of immense self-deprication, a sort of unwillingness to accept the now, the "here", the limerance towards "there" always being stronger, overwhelming and blinding with the heat of stars and the energy of the demonic love of being and the hatred of not-being. It is that which drives the man in Heroes to drink; it is that which drives all of Springsteen's heroes to pursue the love of their lives and their proletarian liberation from the arm of capital and the malice of the non-existent deity that decided not to place them where they want to be; it is that which drives Cameron Winter to be in consistent longing and asking for love, the dream being verified by its own negation again and again with the persistent smile as love takes miles; it is that which Murphy sings will be found in "the night", that great unknown where you'll find the meaning of life in a disco ball.

Each one of these artists represents this current in a different way but they are unified in knowing that "there" might not really even exist, but the denial is strong, the call is too great to deny, the hate keeps pushing them and kicking them around such that they crawl ever more towards whatever it is. I'll take the time to look at each of them and how it appears in their work separately to create a unified perspective of "there" music as it appeared to me and perhaps why it is so and why it is deceptively dangerous.

Bowie's Heroes is perhaps the greatest song ever made. It is a six minute ode to hope; the pain thereof, the love thereof, the dejection and the desparation flowing out in bursts out of the mouth of a man who had in those last few years been through hell; addiction had ravaged Bowie's soul and turned him towards some of the most extreme ideas possible, deluded him and robbed him of his capacity to be human. The Thin White Duke is a soulless apparition, for as much as that era constitutes some of Bowie's greatest music, it is also some of his most dead because the duke is fundamentally incapable of feeling love, and yes, he's wrong, it is the side effect of the cocaine. His figure is one of immense danger and one that will rip the hearts of those who approach, throwing darts in lovers' eyes. Of course, The Thin White Duke dies in essence when Bowie kicks his cocaine habit, moving to Germany and becoming someone else, occupying this middle ground in Low of attempting to recover in this new town and become someone different, the narrative reaching its peak in Heroes, the song, where he finally becomes that person, capable of true earnest feeling that is entirely uncontained by the dejection. It is this desparate calling out for things to finally be okay, and it hurts to listen to.

Heroes is a song that kills me every time I listen to it. It is a hope that will not be accomplished no matter what. It is a drunken fool ranting to his greatest beloved and attempting to showcase her beauty to her, and the folly lies in the fact that, as he sings, it is for one day that he yearns to be free of all the pain and never being able to be himself, an expression of how all of us are continually levelled in Kierkegaardian terms by our modern world, and yet the hope never dies, the craving, the feeling that this is not okay and that it should be otherwise.

Heroes is beautiful, and it is the quintessential "there" song, because it betrays the boundless pain of being a dreamer and it showcases the great failure of this view to accomodate the difficulty of being.

It manifests more consistently and more decisively in Bruce Springsteen than just about any other artist. Springsteen's music is working class in the truest sense: every last protagonist of his is caught in a spiral of hate because of capital and because of his inability to break out of the constraints of the expectations of the greater society and because he can't find the love he so desparately craves and desires. It is an ethos that formed the entire backbone of Springsteen's musical career, the man became a poet of men who wanted to prove to themselves not only their worth as men but wanted to not just be men, but to be people in the way that the patriarchy constantly denies them as the expected responsibility of their social status forces them into this subjectified role as Son, Worker, Husband, but to every last one of his men, the open road of Kerouac is much more interesting than the office.

Of course, even across different Springsteen records this manifests itself differently. Contrasting Born To Run with Darkness On The Edge Of Town seems the most immediate way of describing this. Born To Run is drunk on the fury of thunder road, Wendy and Mary and the men they love are caught in the great comedy of existence and refuse to abide by its logic, throwing themselves to the denial and to hope, "together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness, I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.."

Of course, this is a coping mechanism for the fact that they are fundamentally trapped but they are nevertheless unwilling to accept that, and all the better for them as they are empowered implicitly. Darkness On The Edge Of Town is a much more realistic depiction of the cost of such a choice; the people around refuse to believe, the men lie in hopeless dreams and kill themselves again and again for the hope of The Promised Land. That, perhaps, not only is his greatest song, but the best encapsulation of the double-edged sword that wanting to be "there" causes: an inability to accept "here" and as such, the dogs howl because howling is the only thing a limping dog can do, and we all limp towards the fountains of escape in the hope that they make cure us of the hangover we've all been lived with for so long.